THE SATURDAY PROFILE

THE SATURDAY PROFILE; Japanese Pastor Reaches Out With Suicide Line

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

Published: May 31, 2003

TOKYO—
FOR the Rev. Yukio Saito, reflecting on the suicide hot line he opened in Japan 30 years ago inevitably raises mixed feelings.

There is a satisfaction in knowing that many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have been saved by his initiative, Lifeline. It has expanded since 1971 from a single telephone bank staffed in the cramped recesses of a Tokyo church to a network of 50 call-in centers all around Japan, most operating 24 hours a day, employing more than 7,000 volunteer counselors.

But even labors on such a scale, he acknowledges wryly, seem to have had little effect on the silent avalanche of desperate people in this society driven to take their own lives. Long one of the world's highest, the reported suicide rate in Japan has increased 50 percent in just the last five years, reaching an annual toll of 30,000 deaths.

''Looking back, it is rather interesting -- no, depressing -- to note that by today's standards the problem was relatively small when we started out,'' said Mr. Saito, 67, who wears sober gray suits that match his thinning hair.

He came to work in suicide prevention through a friendship with a German woman who sheltered Japanese prostitutes in the 1970's. In the era of Japan's most robust economic growth, the cost of rapid industrialization was the breakdown of the traditional extended family and the transformation of cities like Tokyo into what was known, even then, as emotional deserts.

Fast-rising suicide rates had persuaded Mr. Saito to travel to the United States for training at a seminary in suicide counseling, and bring to Japan what would prove to be a groundbreaking vocation in a country where the shame and stigma surrounding suicide had enforced a deafening silence around the issue.

When he returned after a year away, an early experience working on his hot line convinced him that he had found his calling.

''A woman called and said she had just swallowed a large number of pills,'' he said in his scarcely modulated baritone. ''Ordinarily we don't do this, but my assistant said we would come and get her. We drove to the place where she had fallen and got her to the hospital, where she had her stomach pumped.

''Her parents and friends had simply told her to be firm in her will to live, which only made things worse for her. Later, she told me that what had changed her mind about life was the concern showed to her by others.''

Since then, he has devoted his life to persuading the isolated and despondent to spare themselves. After more than three decades, Mr. Saito, retired from regular preaching, admits to few other interests.

But it is a calling that has often placed the Methodist minister at odds even with fellow believers in Japan's small Christian population, and that has fed feelings of estrangement from a mostly Shinto and Buddhist society. These religions, particularly Shinto, are more permissive of suicide.

AFTER initial inroads when it was brought here by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century, Christianity has failed to spread, even as Japan has adopted other Western influences, from mass production to baseball, more eagerly than any other country in Asia.

For this reason, Mr. Saito has been attacked even within his own parish for not making a pitch to convert anguished callers to the hot line. But he does not compromise on that principle. ''In order to appeal to everyone, we must not preach Christianity on the phone,'' he said. ''When we receive calls from desperate people, our job is to understand these people, and to accept their feelings,'' he added, describing a method far more akin to psychoanalysis than to religious salvation.

''Although I am a pastor, I became convinced a long time ago that saving lives was the most important work I could do,'' he said.

For all of his reluctance to preach to the anguished, Mr. Saito acknowledges that his Christianity led him into his work. As he tells the story, his own conversion had a mysterious, almost preordained quality.

Like many young Japanese, he felt unmoored and angst-ridden as a teenager amid the devastation of the years immediately following World War II. His family had a longtime ties to Shinto, Japan's ancient syncretic faith. Indeed, the grandfather who raised him after his father died at an early age was a Shinto priest.

There was a church not far from his home, however, and one day he wandered into it. He was never the same again, he said. ''I began going to church at the age of 15, in the middle of a huge identity crisis,'' he said. ''I was asking myself who am I, where am I from, what are my talents, and what will I become. I went into the church for answers, and became aware of a totally new life.''

IN many ways, Christianity leads a double life in Japan. From its earliest days, it has found its most enduring popularity among a tiny elite. As a social force, however, it is most vigorous on society's fringes, among outcasts, from death row criminals to prostitutes and the homeless.

Mr. Saito rebels against this dual tradition just as strongly as he rejects the idea of using his hot lines to proselytize. ''Suicide is a big phenomenon among the well-to-do in our society,'' he said. ''Christianity should not just focus its energies on the poorest. Its relevance must be demonstrated for everyone.''

The conversation with Mr. Saito, in a spare room in Lifeline's rented space in a Tokyo church, was scarcely tinged with the discussions of spirituality one would expect from a pastor.

SEVENTY percent of the country's suicides are committed by men, and almost everyone here invokes two causes: the huge social changes in the early postwar period and the protracted economic crisis of the last 12 years that has ravaged the careers of millions of ''salarymen,'' or corporate employees.

To this, Mr. Saito adds a particular form of modern loneliness washing over Japan, where nuclear families occupy the same home but scarcely communicate, where dating and friendships are negotiated on the tiny screens of mobile phones, and where the phenomenon of shut-ins -- total, housebound seclusion -- has become endemic. ''What we have seen is the collapse of the family throughout Japan, even in small towns,'' said Mr. Saito, who is married and has a grown son. ''Loneliness has become universal.''

Although Lifeline's volunteers must master techniques like sensitivity training and role-playing, their most important service is simply keeping company with lonely strangers, Mr. Saito said.

''After talking with a caller for over an hour once, one counselor felt that things had been pretty well resolved,'' he said. ''At the end, the woman said: 'Please don't hang up. You needn't say anything more, I'm just afraid of being alone.' ''